Gatherly

Gather.ly — previously Iam150/ — was the first client I had the privilege of working with soon after deciding to go freelance. Andy, Nick, Sophie and Gavin were some of the nicest people I've had the good fortune of working with. I was hired to oversee the responsibility of the front-end side of things, which involved addressing performance, responsiveness and overall design improvements, across both desktop and mobile/touch devices – all in aid of their big out-of-beta launch.

Most of the features I worked on and helped implement – such as user '@mentioning', embedded content previews, Mandrill & MailChimp integration, likes and new post notifications – were already structurally built server-side, but needed new Javascript modules to be written to help pull though their content and handle their respective actions.

A modern front-end workflow was essential to manage compiling, building and deploying between different environments. For this Grunt.js was my choice, along with Sass to modularise the CSS development. The application runs off Node.js, MongoDB, Express.js and uses additional technologies such as Mandrill and MailChimp APIs, Handlebars, Embed.ly, as well as Facebook and Twitter oAuth Node libraries.

Gather.ly is a unique take on the concept of sharing within interest-driven groups – definitely worth checking out.